her filming from Dr. Riyadh's roof during
a firefight in the neighborhood, and, ac-
cording to an article by Peter Maass in the
Times Magazine, an o cer wrote a report
suggesting that she might have had fore-
knowledge of the attack. (She denied hav-
ing any, and no evidence suggests other-
wise.) A journalist named John Bruning
eventually published a book about the sol-
diers' battalion, "The Devil's Sandbox,"
in which he repeated the same charge
against Poitras. Then again, she told me,
the trigger may have been a wire transfer
that she sent in 2006 to Dr. Riyadh when
his family fled Iraq's civil war. Bruning's
book claims that the battalion suspected
the doctor of being an insurgent. (There
is no evidence for this, either.)
Poitras didn't like to speculate about
the reasons. Her feeling was: "I've done
nothing to deserve being put on a watch
list." She also didn't want to exaggerate
the danger. "Let's just be honest," she told
me. "If I had darker skin, or was carrying
a di erent passport, the cast of guilt, the
shadow, would go a lot longer." Neverthe-
less, she felt that she had been sucked into
an unaccountable system: once her name
was flagged, her life changed, and she
could never get an explanation for it.The
experience led her to adopt extreme mea-
sures with computer and phone security
and, eventually, to move to Berlin. She no
longer believed that she could keep priv-
ileged material safe when travelling to
and from the U.S. The airport interroga-
tions ended only after Greenwald wrote a
column for Salon about them, in 2012.
By then, Poitras had begun making
the final film of her trilogy. She was inter-
ested in domestic surveillance and the
people who stood up to it. She filmed As-
sange in England, where he was seeking
asylum to avoid extradition to Sweden to
face sexual-assault accusations; Green-
wald in Rio de Janeiro, where he was
writing about whistle-blowers; and Bin-
ney, a retired Cold War crypto-mathema-
tician with the N.S.A., who had become
a whistle-blower about domestic spying
and had been interrogated several times
by the F.B.I. She was captivated by these
people, and some of them became her
friends. (Not the prickly Assange.) She
accumulated huge amounts of footage.
On one wall of her editing room there
were long lists of characters and loca-
tions from all over the world. She was ex-
ploring the idea of a movie with no plot,
something nonlinear and indetermi-
nate---a "Zeitgeist"film. "Plot is so relent-
less," she said. "It's totally unforgiving, and
it also can be simplifying. It can provide
resolution where there should be none. It
can provide false catharsis."
One of the film's subjects was Poitras's
friend Jacob Appelbaum, the young
American expert on online anonymity.
Appelbaum trained activists in Tunisia,
Egypt, and elsewhere, including the
U.S., to thwart state surveillance, and,
like Poitras, he had moved to Berlin. He
said that he was living in "political exile,"
and saw himself as a dissident who had
been persecuted for his views. One after-
noon in Berlin, we met at a private club
that he, Poitras, and others in their circle
belong to. (Appelbaum joked that it had
become the group's hangout because of
Poitras's "bourgeois tendencies.") He
was meticulous about his appearance---
he wore hipster glasses, and the top of
his right ear was pierced by a metal
bar---though his eyes had a wild inten-
sity. He insisted on being interviewed in
the club's sauna, where another naked
man was lying down. This seemed to be
Appelbaum's way of insuring that I
wasn't hiding any surveillance devices.
We had contrary ideas about privacy: I
keep my phone with me during inter-
views, but I don't like discussing personal
matters in front of strangers with my
clothes o . After fifteen minutes, the
pages of my notebook were soaked in
sweat, and I asked to move the venue.We
continued talking in an adjacent room,
where numerous men wrapped in tow-
els lounged on benches as Appelbaum
"They fixed the printer."